As a mostly failed provider of flowers for my patient spouse Joan, I was impressed with myself one Mother’s Day when I happened to be in the grocery store and saw a display of flowers. For some reason this particular bunch of lovely red roses was cheaper than another bunch which I figured was just a different variety. But the cheaper ones looked great, what was not to like, why not be a good steward of precious resources? Or as some might less charitably put it, a cheapskate?

So I proudly took home the bouquet of a dozen roses and offered them up. Joan was indeed touched that I had thought to provide them but with slightly furrowed brow also offered something along the lines of “I would never have thought of that–tulips for Mother’s Day. But they’re beautiful!”

I was taken aback. How could these lovely red flowers be other than roses? But Joan patiently and compassionately explained that tulips is what they were. This was why they were cheaper than the other red flowers which were actually roses.

I told the story in church that morning as part of launching a sermon. Congregants who owned a garden center risked falling off their chairs at this revelation of just how lacking in common sense and basic knowledge their pastor was.

But then came the following Sunday. They had brought a lovely little potted plant to the sanctuary. They explained that this was a rose bush from their nursery. They were giving it to me. If I planted it and managed to keep it alive it would teach me what roses look like.

Amid the general hilarity I was actually quite taken with their gift. I carefully planted it and for some years was tickled when a few roses would appear to remind me how to tell a rose from a tulip. But the plant always struggled and once was so hard to see I mowed over part of it.

Eventually it was gone from where I’d planted it. I forgot it.  Then yesterday Joan and I went for a walk. She pointed out this tall bush with multiple red flowers on it. “Do you remember what those are?” Indeed! “Yes, those are not tulips; they’re roses.”

“Did you remember,” she asked, “that when it just kept struggling and struggling I transplanted it to that flower garden in case it did better there?” If I’d ever known this, I’d lost track of it.

What a memento, these decades later. A memento of life as a mixture of stumbles and mistakes, of good intentions and failed implementations, from the tangles of which–nurtured with patience, generosity, grace, and nudges of encouragement–red-rose beauty can spring.

—Michael A. King, publisher and president, Cascadia Publishing House LLC, blogs at Kingsview & Co, https://www.cascadiapublishinghouse.com/KingsviewCo